NEWS STORY

Monday, January 6, 2014

Pratt & Whitney's use of 3D printing (additive manufacturing) was highlighted on a CBS Evening News segment in December. The two-minute feature reports on the future of 3D printing in the aerospace industry and also features several clips of the PurePower® engine.

"While we're seeing great advantages with the technologies today, we know there's a long runway that we haven't even seen yet, so being able to continue to work on this is a very exciting thing for us," said Tom Prete, vice president, Engineering. Earlier in the segment, Prete called the use of additive manufacturing "truly revolutionary."

Pratt & Whitney has used 3D printing since 1988 to produce prototypes for testing and development. As technology has advanced over the past several years, the company has been able to adopt metal 3D printing prototyping. In fact, The Pratt & Whitney Additive Manufacturing Innovation Center at UConn, a state-of-the-art laboratory opened in 2013, is the first of its kind in the Northeast to work with metals rather than plastics.

The PurePower® engine family will be the first to incorporate production hardware using powder bed additive manufacturing.